Toby and Tanner Howard (Pine, Foster) are brothers who carry out bank robberies. They target branches of the Texas Midlands Bank, hitting two of them in the same morning. They are working to a plan of Toby’s devising, and they cover their tracks to the extent of burying the cars they use in the robberies, and taking the money across the state line into Oklahoma and laundering it at an Indian casino. Once the money has been laundered, they then get the casino to issue their “winnings” in the form of a cheque… which is made out to Texas Midlands Bank. Why? Because thanks to a reverse mortgage provided by the bank to the brothers’ recently deceased mother, their ranch will suffer foreclosure if the outstanding mortgage isn’t paid. And that’s without the oil that’s been found on their ranch as well…

The police investigation is headed up by Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Bridges) and his long-suffering partner, Alberto Parker (Birmingham). Hamilton is near to retirement, and his experience tells him that the bank robbers have a specific sum they’re aiming for; once they’ve got it they’ll stop – even though Tanner carries out an impromptu robbery on another bank. Realising that they’ve got a beef with Texas Midlands Bank, Hamilton persuades Parker to stake out one of the bank’s other branches, and they wait for the robbers to show up. With only one more robbery needed to net them the rest of the money they need, Toby and Tanner arrive at another branch altogether, only to find it’s been closed down. They decide to rob another branch in a bigger town, which also means a bigger risk.

The robbery is not a complete success. The brothers get the money they need but find themselves pursued by gun-toting locals. They manage to split up, and soon Tanner finds himself followed by the police. As he heads into the nearby hills in an attempt to escape, Toby takes the money and tries to get across the border and return to the Indian casino. But first there’s the small matter of a police checkpoint…

A modern day Western set in West Texas (but shot mostly in Eastern New Mexico), Hell or High Water‘s sombre screenplay used to be known as Comancheria. Neither title really does justice to a story that revolves around money and the way in which its importance is felt keenly by those who don’t have it, or how casually it’s regarded by those that do have it. This part of West Texas is peppered with roadside signs offering both financial and religious solutions for dealing with personal debt, but none of these signs have been put there by the banks or the loan companies that are deemed responsible for so much of the debt and deprivation that the average West Texan endures as part of their daily life.

But Toby Howard isn’t going to accept the loss of his family’s ranch (or the oil found below it). He’s not going to become another victim of the financial institutions that plague the area with their fire-sale mentality and lack of humanity. Along with his brother, Tanner, he’s going to fight back, he’s going to make Texas Midlands Bank accountable to him. It’s a classic David vs Goliath tale, except that in this case, Goliath doesn’t even know he’s in a fight. Taylor Sheridan’s perceptive, yet harsh screenplay makes it clear who the villain of the piece is, and it’s not the brothers, even if Hamilton and Parker firmly believe they are. And it adds to the harshness of the story that Hamilton never stops viewing the Howards as villains, even when he begins to work out why they’re robbing banks in the first place. Where the viewer can have a large degree of sympathy for their plight and their solution, Hamilton has only one judgment to give: they’re criminals, pure and simple.

Mackenzie keeps things this simple throughout, and does so against a backdrop of financial ruin and macho posturing that serves as a vindication for Tanner and Hamilton’s behaviour. Tanner’s a hothead, unpredictable and rash; you never know if he’s going to jeopardise Toby’s plan or see it through without incident. Foster has played this kind of role before, but here he injects a sense of melancholy that makes Tanner more tragic than perhaps he has a right to be. It makes his performance all the more impressive: Foster knows that Tanner is as close to a stereotype as this movie gets, but he ignores that and makes the character as intriguing and beguiling in an off-kilter way as he can.

Bridges is equally impressive, his brooding, jowly features looking out and around from behind his sunglasses, his massively non-PC comments about his partner’s racial background funny, but only in a “long-time married couple” sense. But Sheridan’s script doesn’t let Hamilton have it all his own way. When he says, proudly, “This is what they call white man’s intuition,” Alberto is quick to respond, and in a perfectly deadpan manner: “Sometimes a blind pig finds a truffle.” All humour aside, though, Bridges projects a stern, authoritarian personality for Hamilton; he’s a man caught at the end of a career that has seen so many changes it’s almost overwhelming, so much so that once his retirement arrives, he can’t rest or leave the past behind.

These two roles, and the complexity that both actors bring to them, threaten to leave Pine way behind in the acting stakes, but he’s more than a match as the mastermind behind it all, his downtrodden, put-upon character finally taking a chance on himself in a desperate time of need. Pine isn’t exactly the most intuitive of actors – you can see the wheels turning in most of his performances – but here he does something quite remarkable: he imparts a stillness to the role that makes Toby all the more worthy of our time and attention. Foster may have the flashier role, but it’s Pine who provides the moral and emotional compass for the movie to navigate by.

All this is set against some stunning desert landscapes, perfectly lensed and lit by DoP Giles Nuttgens, and acting as unconcerned characters occasionally drafted into the story for effect. Those wide open expanses, with their unending vistas and rippling heat hazes speak of a far-off country where the promise of a better life is just over the horizon – if only the brothers could get there. But Toby’s plan is much more prosaic than that, and Mackenzie uses the character’s yearning for a better life for his children to highlight Toby’s innate nobility. Mackenzie and Nuttgens are aided by exceptional editing by Jake Roberts – the movie has an elegiac feel throughout that lends itself so well to the movie’s internal rhythm – and there’s a wonderfully melancholy, rueful score courtesy of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Rating: 9/10 – a movie that rewards the viewer on so many levels, Hell or High Water takes its financial vigilante characters down a hard road indeed, but makes the prize as compelling and profound as possible, and without dumbing down the narrative; the three leads are magnificent, and the whole mise-en-scene is handled with care and confidence by all concerned, leading to a movie that is by turns haunting, complex, thrilling, and emotionally draining.

The mid- to late Sixties were a strange time for Vincent Price’s career. Prior to making The Jackals, the actor had teamed with Roger Corman to make a series of gothic horrors based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, made a handful of TV appearances in the likes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, showed he could do camp as well as anyone else in two movies as Dr. Goldfoot, and proved especially hammy (though to good effect) with occasional appearances as Egghead in TV’s Batman. And then he made this: a Western filmed in South Africa – and possibly the oddest movie in his filmography.

A remake of Yellow Sky (1948), which starred Gregory Peck, Anne Baxter, and Richard Widmark, The Jackals begins with shots designed to establish its South African setting. We see zebras and elephants, and other animals, while a drum- and xylophone-based music score stands out awkwardly in the soundtrack’s foreground. We also see some snippets of tribal dancing until a group of cowboys are shown riding through the South African countryside. Soon they reach a small town, where they rob the bank. In the getaway, one of them is shot and killed. The group’s leader, Stretch (Gunner), persuades the rest to traverse an inhospitable desert area as a way of losing the posse chasing them. When they get to the other side, they find a ghost town, and the two remaining people who live there.

One is a young woman, Willie (Ivarson). She wants the men to go, but her grandfather, Oupa (Price), invites them to stay for as long as it takes for their horses to be well-rested. The men soon learn that Oupa is a prospector and has been working a nearby gold mine. At first, they intend to steal everything that the old man has accumulated, but Stretch’s attraction for Willie leads to his having a change of heart, and he strikes a deal with the old man that is meant to avoid any bloodshed. But two of Stretch’s men, Dandy (Courtney) and Gotz (Mynhardt), have their minds set on taking all the gold, and having their way with Willie. The longer they stay, the more that tempers flare, and Stretch’s command is called more and more into question, until Dandy can’t wait any more – and tries his best to remove his “competition”.

Why Price made this particular movie isn’t known. It’s likely he signed on because it meant a chance to visit South Africa, it’s also likely it was because it meant a change of pace and character for someone who had become somewhat typecast as a horror star (it didn’t help that he went from this to making Witchfinder General (1968) for Michael Reeves). Whatever the reason, the finished product is not one of his best; though he is the best thing in it, by a longshot. With a twinkle in his eye, and a laugh not too far from his lips, Price plays Oupa like the kindly old man he was in real life. He’s the only member of the cast who appears to be behaving normally (given the circumstances), and the only actor who can speak his/her lines without sounding like they’re still learning them.

But Price, despite being top-billed, is actually playing a supporting role. Off screen for much of the movie, Price has to leave the heavy lifting to contract players Gunner and Ivarson. Alas, neither of them are particularly convincing, especially as a romance develops between their characters and they’re required to look as if they’re attracted to each other. Gunner went on to make one more movie, playing the astronaut Landon in Planet of the Apes (1968), while Ivarson made three more movies before leaving the business. It’s easy to see why both actors didn’t have longer careers; Gunner looks tense and uncertain throughout, and makes hard work of his dialogue. Ivarson spits out her lines with venom, mistaking her character’s insecurity for hatred, and her performance is maddingly one-note as a result. Watching them both, you just wish and pray that they’ll loosen up at some point; sadly, they don’t.

They’re not helped by the vagaries of the script, a combination of Lamar Trotti’s 1948 screenplay and Harold Medford’s undistinguished update. The characters have all the traits of often-seen stereotypes, from Courtney’s scheming Dandy (the only one who looks as dapper as his name), to Brewer’s good-natured oaf, and on down to Whiteley’s callow youth. And with lines of the calibre of, “I just wanted to show you how safe you’d be if I really wanted to get rough” (spoken by Stretch after he forces himself on Willie), the movie strays too close to misogyny for comfort – and not just the once.

In the director’s chair, Webb adopts a tired, bare minimum approach that doesn’t help either. Scenes come and go in a perfunctory manner, as if most of them were assembled from first takes (there are a lot of continuity issues here), and lack the vitality needed to keep the audience involved with the material. Even the final shootout, usually the one aspect of a Western that most directors manage to get right, is so flatly choreographed and shot that by the time it’s over, it’s as much a relief for the viewer as it is for the characters. This was Webb’s last outing save for a couple of documentaries, and as swansong’s go isn’t one that can be recommended. As well as being unable to extract decent performances from his cast, he’s unable to elicit good work from his DoP, David Millin, or rescue the movie with his editor, Peter Grossett.

There’s too much that doesn’t work in The Jackals, and the whole thing is saddled (no pun intended) with a score that is completely South African in flavour and style, and which never matches the content or the mood of the narrative. All it does is remind the viewer that they’re watching a Western that’s been made in South Africa, and even though it’s a 20th Century Fox movie, it’s clear that concessions were made in order to get the movie agreed to and completed. As a further consequence of the movie’s low budget and scaled-back production values, it all leads to the realisation that whenever anyone is walking or running, it’s not footsteps that appear on the soundtrack but the sound of hoofbeats instead.

Rating: 4/10 – pretty meagre stuff, with poor performances from everyone except Price, and ineffectual direction from Webb, making The Jackals a disappointing experience from start to finish; as a curio it has a certain caché, but unless you’re a fan of Price there’s very little here to reward the casual viewer, and even less for regular Western enthusiasts.

Rating: 7/10 – a hitman (Shevtsov) hired by an unscrupulous bar owner (Holmes) winds up injured while trying to leave town, and ends up playing a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with a waitress (Haig) when he seeks refuge in her home; a slow-burn thriller that takes its time and relies on tension and atmosphere to keep the viewer hooked, Crawl often belies its low budget, and features terrific performances from Shevtsov (in a role written expressly for him) and Haig, but stops short of being completely effective thanks to some awkward narrative choices and first-timer China’s lack of experience as a director.

Rating: 3/10 – career criminal Jack Elwell (Lee) meets the love of his life, Avalon (Bubear), and decides that robbing a bank is the way to a financially stable relationship, but unfortunately the money he steals belongs to crime boss Gan Sirankiri (Seagal), and soon Jack is being coerced into robbing more of Sirankiri’s banks when one of his men (Boonthanakit) threatens to expose him; what could have been a moderately entertaining action thriller is let down by some atrocious acting (and not just from Seagal), some equally atrocious camerawork, editing that looks like it was done with a hatchet, and the kind of direction that gives “point and shoot” a bad name, all of which leaves The Asian Connection looking like something to be avoided at all costs.

Rating: 3/10 – a journalist (Winter) looks into the disappearance of a friend, and discovers a secret world of government experiments that are linked to strange radio broadcasts and the discredited MK Ultra program from the Sixties; a paranoid thriller with supernatural overtones, Banshee Chapter tries extra hard to be unsettling and creepy – much of it takes place at night and has been shot using low light – but fails to make its story of any interest to anyone watching, which means that Winter and Levine put a lot of effort into their roles but are let down by the tortuous script and Erickson’s wayward direction.

Rating: 5/10 – the writer, Herman Melville (Whishaw), convinces retired sailor Tom Nickerson (Gleeson) to talk about his experiences as a young boy at sea, and in particular his time aboard the Essex, a whaling ship that encountered a creature Melville will call Moby Dick; based on the true story of the Essex, and the voyage that saw it sunk by an enormous whale, In the Heart of the Sea is technically well made but lacks anyone to care about, avoids providing a true sense of the enormity of what happened, sees Ron Howard directing on auto-pilot, and leaves Hemsworth and Walker struggling to make amends for characters who are paper-thin to the point of being caricatures (or worse still, carbon copies of Fletcher Christian and William Bligh from Mutiny on the Bounty).

Rating: 7/10 – in the late Thirties, a young man, Noah (Gosling), sets his cap for the girl of his dreams, Allie (McAdams), and though they fall in love, social conventions keep them apart, while in the modern day their story is told by an old man (Garner) to a woman with dementia (Rowlands); handsomely mounted and told with a genuine feel for the central characters and their travails, Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook is an old-fashioned romantic drama that could have been made in the time period it covers, and which is bolstered by the performances of its four stars, as well as Cassavetes’ (son of Rowlands) sure-footed direction, glorious cinematography by Robert Fraisse, and a sense of inevitable tragedy that permeates the narrative to very good effect indeed.

Rating: 6/10 – a stagecoach station finds itself under attack from angry Apaches after a white man kills several of their tribe – and the evidence points to the station agent’s father, a wanted outlaw (Roland), as the killer; a compact, fast-paced Western, Apache War Smoke zips by in low-budget style thanks to the efforts of two-time Oscar winner Kress – editing awards for How the West Was Won (1962) and The Towering Inferno (1974) – and a cast who enter willingly into the spirit of things, making this studio-made Western set in Tonto Valley Station(!) a surprising treat.

Rating: 8/10 – spy Harry Tasker (Schwarzenegger) must track down and thwart the plans of jihadists to detonate nuclear bombs on US soil – and keep it all secret from his unsuspecting wife (Curtis); even now, True Lies remains tremendous fun, even if it does get bogged down by its middle act domestic dramatics, and Cameron directs with his usual attention to detail and aptitude for kinetic energy.

Rating: 7/10 – a look at the lives of self-made millionaire David Siegel and his wife Jaqueline, as their lives go from riches to rags thanks to the economic crisis in 2008; “how the other half lived” might be an appropriate subtitle for The Queen of Versailles, and the ways in which the Siegels try to deal with their reversal of fortune will bring a wry smile to viewers who aren’t millionaires, but ultimately this is a story about a couple for whom hardship means not being able to build their dream home: an enormous mansion that defies both taste and propriety.

Rating: 2/10 – an inexperienced young policeman (James) is given the job of infiltrating a gang suspected of carrying out bank robberies across the South of England; a low-budget, amateurish effort, Brighton Mob features dreadful dialogue, awful acting, and the kind of direction that seems to have been carried out by someone who’s not actually watching any of the dailies.

Rating: 7/10 – when Suzanne (Michon) learns that her husband (Bader) is having an affair and wants a divorce, she goes on a voyage of personal discovery; with several pertinent (if obvious) points to make about self-esteem and body image, Muffin Top: A Love Story is a gently comedic, engaging movie that features an endearing performance from Michon, and doesn’t overdo its theme of female empowerment.

Rating: 4/10 – when volcanic activity strikes Los Angeles, it brings with it giant fire-breathing spiders, and only action movie hero Colton West (Guttenberg) can save the day; taking its cue from the Sharknado series’ combination of low-budget special effects and broad self-referential humour, Lavalantula is enjoyable enough if you just go with it, and benefits from having Mendez – who gave us the superior Big Ass Spider! (2013) – in the director’s chair.

Rating: 6/10 – after a show goes disastrously, embarrassingly wrong, the Barden Bellas are banned from competing in the US, but it doesn’t stop them from taking part in the World A Capella Championships and going up against the dominating Das Sound Machine; a predictable sequel that offers nothing new (other than a great cameo by Snoop Dogg), Pitch Perfect 2 will satisfy fans of the original but newcomers might wonder what all the fuss is about.

Rating: 2/10 – the ghost of Mary Worth (Ricci) targets the makers of a music video when her name is invoked and she finds the reincarnation of the man who killed her is the video’s star; dire in the extreme, Bloody Mary 3D is the kind of low budget horror movie that gives low budget horror movies a bad name, and criminally, takes too much time out to showcase Jameson’s limited talents as a singer (and the 3D is awful as well).